1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to electronic systems and, more specifically, to design of a heat spreader for memory modules.
2. Description of the Related Art
In modern computing platforms, there is provision for population of semiconductor memory using one or more dual inline memory modules (DIMMs). One of the problems commonly encountered during integration of memory modules into a computer system is heat dissipation. The ability to maintain the temperature of components on a module within the required operating range depends on many factors including module surface area, airflow velocity, temperature of incoming air, location of the module in the system and presence or absence of adjacent modules. Designers of electronic systems make tradeoffs between these variables to achieve acceptable system thermal performance while keeping cost to a minimum.
Early designs have employed heat sinks and custom-designed enclosures in an attempt to address the heat dissipation problem. While designs employing heat spreaders have been used in systems to date, the inexorable demand for more, higher speed, and higher density memory modules have caused memory power dissipation requirements to increase faster than improvements in heat sink/heat spreader performance. Oftentimes, some designs are capable of dissipating the heat, but fall short with respect to the mechanical integrity of the module under shipping, handling, and insertion/removal. Other designs may satisfy the mechanical integrity constraints, but fall short in the area of heat dissipation. Still other designs may achieve both the heat dissipation and mechanical requirements, but are impractically expensive.
Another major difficulty in a conventional heat spreader design is that of achieving acceptable thermal performance independent of the large changes in air flow velocity caused by the variation of spacing between modules depending on which modules are installed in the system. Thermal solutions that work well with all modules present in the system often do not perform acceptably with only a single module present, due to the reduced air velocity and tendency of the airflow to bypass around the module.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a heat spreader design that overcomes these and/or other problems associated with the prior art.